Volts podcast: how to get urban improvements done quickly

In this episode, transportation planner Warren Logan shares his
expertise on how cities can make fast, cheap, impactful
improvements to safety and walkability.


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transcript)


(Active
transcript)


Text transcript:


David Roberts


When it comes to reducing transportation emissions, two main
ideas compete for mindshare in the climate space. First is
switching out internal combustion engine vehicles for electric
vehicles. Second is improving the built environment to make
walking, biking, and public transit easier, to reduce the amount
of miles traveled in cars and trucks altogether.


The conventional wisdom is that the former is faster. There are a
few key policy levers that can be pulled to get massive numbers
of EVs on the roads, whereas urban improvements proceed one at a
time, each facing its own bespoke set of challenges.


But there are people out there at the city level working to
increase the speed of those improvements. One of them is Warren
Logan, currently a partner at Lighthouse Public Affairs, but
before that, policy director of mobility in the Oakland,
California, mayor's office, a senior transportation planner for
San Francisco, and an intern in the transportation office at
Berkeley, California.


In his time working on transportation projects, Logan has given a
lot of thought to, and done a lot of work on, improving city
processes to make safety and walkability improvements faster and
less capital-intensive. He wants cities to free themselves up to
make fast, cheap changes that can have big impacts without an
enormous investment of time and money.


As listeners will have noticed, I have been somewhat obsessed
lately with urban design and transportation issues. I hope you
will indulge me in another conversation about the nature of
resistance to urban improvements, the kinds of changes that can
be made quickly to dramatically improve safety, and the larger
need to avoid over-reliance on EVs.


Warren Logan, thank you for coming to Volts and sharing your
time.


Warren Logan


Thank you so much for having me, David.


David Roberts


Let's start with a little Warren background, a little Warren
history here. Tell us sort of what your position was and what
you're more to the point, sort of what your engagement was in
transportation and transportation projects. Tell us about your
last few years.


Warren Logan


Sure. So before my time at Lighthouse Public Affairs, as a
partner in Public Affairs, I was Mayor Libby Schaaf's Policy
Director of Transportation and Government Affairs of the City of
Oakland, which is two jobs that they pushed together. And I think
it's important to share here just quickly that before my time in
the mayor's office, I was also a transportation planner in the
city and county of San Francisco. And before that was an urban
designer as a consultant in the East Bay, in the Bay area here.
And before that was a transportation planner again for the city
of Berkeley.


So my point here is I've done a lot of different cool
transportation work across the Bay.


David Roberts


Yeah, you must know so many NIMBYs. It's like a NIMBY survey
you've done with your career.


Warren Logan


Yeah.


David Roberts


Berkeley to Oakland.


Warren Logan


You got it. And this might come out later in our podcast, but
most of the subjects I've worked on have been like, "what's the
most contentious issue at the time? Changing parking pricing.
Let's talk about bike lanes. Let's talk about ... let's keep the
city from falling apart during COVID," easy subjects really.


David Roberts


Tell us then at the sort of high level of abstraction, which is
just let's address this argument. If I'm Joe Schmo on the street,
I know transportation needs to be decarbonized. And I look around
and I was like, "oh, there's the decarbonized transportation
right there. It's called an electric vehicle. Let's just stop
making the gas vehicles, start making the electric vehicles.
Problem done. Let's move on to the next problem." I think that is
a fairly widespread disposition toward this issue. So just tell
us why you think that at the broadest level, why that kind of
thinking is insufficient.


Warren Logan


Sure. So to all the Joe Schmos out there, the truth of the matter
is that just switching to electric cars is not going to solve all
of our climate issues. And I'm sure we'll go into all the
different reasons why. But for me, and probably for anyone who's
ever been near cars at all, it's not just about the climate that
we have to think about. It's like traffic safety as well. And I
can only stress this enough, that if you get hit by a car, it
doesn't matter if it was an electric vehicle or not. In fact, it
might be worse because they're heavier, which is in no way to say
we shouldn't be considering electric vehicles.


David Roberts


And you might not hear it coming right?


Warren Logan


And you might not hear it coming, right. So, David, your point is
so good, though, that there is certainly room for absolutely
decarbonizing our vehicles. I will admit I own an electric
vehicle, and I own an electric bike, and that together, those two
means of transportation get me really far.


David Roberts


But if you're talking to Joe Schmo and Joe Schmo says, "if I
switch out all the cars, what is the remainder? What is left?"
What is the ... and remember, we're just talking climate here.
Like, there are obviously other issues of urban life, but if
we're just focusing on climate, what is the remainder that's left
after the electric vehicles?


Warren Logan


Yeah, the remainder also includes public transit, which also we
need to work on decarbonizing here in the Bay. And actually, in
California, we passed a bill, I want to say last year or the year
before that required that all of the transit agencies shift over
the next, I think, ten years to electric buses, or electric and
hydrogen, alternate fuel sources. So it's not just that we need
more EV cars. We need EV trucks for all of the deliveries. We
need EVs for the buses and similarly for trains. Not every train
is electric. We're very fortunate here in the bay that Bart runs
on electricity, but there are plenty of trains across the country
that still use gas and diesel, et cetera.


So there's plenty of room for improvement across every subsector
of transportation.


David Roberts


Continuing as Joe Schmo here, I don't know why I chose this name,
but we're stuck with it now. Another sort of, I think, intuition
a lot of people have in this exchange is, "okay, I get it that
maybe EVs aren't enough. I get it that there are other goals. We
want quality of life, we want walkability, things like this. We
want more public space." But in terms of speed, and this is
really where the rubber hits the road in this argument.


Warren Logan


Literally.


David Roberts


Yes. I think Joe Schmo thinks, just quitting making ice vehicles
and starting making EVs. I can see that happening quickly. The
market seems to be accelerating, but it seems like changes in
urbanism, changes in urban form, changes in building, changes in
the way we do streets, this kind of thing take forever. Aren't
they just intrinsically slower?


Warren Logan


They don't have to be. Let me kind of break apart what you just
shared, the first of which is that I don't think that speed is
the only thing we're trying to optimize when it comes to
transportation, even though I think you, Joe, and all the other
Joes out there think I want to get there quickly. Absolutely. I'm
not here to delay your travel, certainly. And yet, one of the
things I've learned in my time as a transportation planner is
that people really discount just how bad traffic can get at times
and that they're part of that issue, and that once you get to
your destination, parking is not typically readily available
depending on where you're going.


And so oftentimes when people say, well, my door to door time is
only ten minutes, that's not really true. And there are plenty of
studies that have been conducted, in fact, by my alma mater at UC
Berkeley showcasing that people underestimate how much time it
takes to drive somewhere and overestimate how much time they
think it will take to take any other form of transportation. And
I think that that's incredibly important. The second bit here.
And I think this is kind of fascinating, that we've all gotten
kind of explore this during COVID Is that the time that it takes
for you to travel from point A to B, B to C, and C to A again or
wherever you're going may not necessarily be as fast if you are
not driving.


But you are able to recoup the value of that time by answering
emails or taking phone calls while you're sitting on an ideally
quiet train, getting from your place to place. And then the last
bit too, is that not everyone can or even wants to drive. Like
fundamentally, driving is, I think, an exercise that people have
truly believe that it's like the most fun thing you can do. And
that's not really true for most people. Like, driving kind of
sucks a lot of times.


And we kind of have this idea that if only there was one more
lane or if only the seats had air conditioning, I would enjoy
this really rote exercise that gets really tough. And you're just
I mean, there's a thing for it. It's called road rage.


David Roberts


Well, you'll notice that the number one most notable feature of
car commercials is that they only contain one car in them, only
the car you're supposed to buy. There are never any other cars on
the street. I'm like, "where is that?"


Warren Logan


Like, where's the rest of this? Right? You never see a commercial
of a car like, "hi, this is you stuck in traffic all day because
this is what it's like to drive in a real city, or even in
suburbs for that matter."


David Roberts


All of that is interesting about speed of travel within the city,
but that was not exactly the speed I was asking you about. I
mean, sure, now I'm fascinated and want to follow up.


Warren Logan


I understand your second question, which is like, the speed of
implementation, right?


David Roberts


Yeah, speed of implementation. How fast are we reducing
greenhouse gas, I guess, is where the rubber hits the road. Full
of automotive metaphors today. This is not on purpose.


Warren Logan


I love it. It's great. I'm going to get my book of idioms, and
I'll see if I can go toe to toe with you, which there's one right
there. So in terms of speed of implementation, I think that I'm
going to call BS, right? Like a. some people really can switch
their cars quickly. That's true. There are people with means to
go out and buy electric vehicles, but they're a. not free, nor
are they cheap. The lowest price EV is, I think, the Nissan Leaf
maybe. And you're still pushing like 40K. That's an expensive car
for a lot of people.


There are plenty of people ... and I want to just kind of talk
about the ways in which people interact with the city, or even
with suburbs, or even rural areas, is that there are lots of
people who are in some ways so low income they have to drive,
which is a really hard thing for people to conceptualize. But let
me just unpack that for a second. We in America have actively
discouraged people from living near their jobs vis-a-vis
suburbanization. And then as more of, I would suppose, like my
generation especially, have started shifting back towards city
centers the price of housing in, I want to say all the cities,
wildly here for a second, has gotten really, really high in
places that are close to jobs.


Which means then that the lower income folks, of whatever age
we're talking about for a second, are then actively discouraged
from both living in a city and actively pushed to farther and
farther places that are not well served by transit, not very
accessible by buses, or trains, or even bikeways, or by extension
jobs. And Oaklanders kind of face this a lot where I live. But
it's true of a lot of places that you have no option but to
drive, but for the fact that you barely can really afford the car
that you're driving, and there isn't an option for you to upgrade
to a more efficient car.


I think that that's kind of the fantasy that a lot of people want
to live in, that if you own a car, you also have the means to
maintain that car properly and by extension, perhaps switch the
car that you're driving overnight. Oh, I just decided tomorrow
I'm going to go buy a Tesla. That's not real. And so for a whole
swath of people who are out there on our streets driving, their
option for switching vehicles is really, really limited. And I
can't speak for many other cities, but I can at least say for the
Bay.


If I step outside of my house right now, I can watch a bunch of
cars that were built in the 90s or even early 80s. None of those
people, and this is sort of a sweeping generalization, but I
would just expect that most of the people driving those vehicles
probably can't afford even a moderately priced electric car.
Because we're talking about buying a $1,000 car, not a 10, or a
20, or 30, or $40,000 car, let alone financing a car, right. And
I'm not even going down a rabbit hole of people's credit and
their ability to buy cars.


David Roberts


It's just one more way that we've made it expensive to be poor in
the US, right? Like they are paying a ton for gas right now, but
do not have the means. They could save money in the long term by
buying the electric vehicle, but you have to have that upfront
capital. If you don't have it, you're just stuck with these
ongoing costs.


Warren Logan


Absolutely. And so that is just one example of many that I will
share with you in just a second of why this fantasy that we're
living in that everyone can just switch to electric vehicles is
just not real. So let's now shift gears to all of the other tools
in our toolbox that we do have at our disposal. And this is kind
of the thing I've said to lots of people, right, that we choose
not to use effectively. So if we wanted tomorrow to have half of
our streets dedicated to walking and bicycling, that is actually
possible.


And I know it's possible because I did it. And so you probably
saw the kind of beginning of COVID, let's rewind two years plus a
few months, right. A number of cities started implementing shared
streets, healthy streets, slow streets, whatever name we gave
them. I think that that movement proved that we've just been
sitting on this gold mine of opportunity. And I want people to
truly examine why is it that we refuse to exercise our ability to
make that type of big shift, why we choose not to use that power,
right? And so implicit in that question is holding all of your
listeners by having them hold aside their opinions of whether or
not we should have done that, just like set that aside for a
second, because I've gotten enough heat about that for now.


But to at least focus on the fact that not only was it possible,
but it was possible in a lot of different cities with a lot of
demographics, a lot of different economics, right, like a lot of
different politics, that lots of different places did this really
big thing nearly overnight. And not just like when I say nearly
overnight, like over a couple of years. I mean, the time and
space between a few text messages between myself, Mayor Shaaf and
the DOT director here in Oakland, and then them setting up the
signs is, I think, 72 hours. So I'm not making this up when I say
that truly these types of changes are possible.


However, and this is kind of the big caveat about speed, is that
we have to choose to want that reality. And I think that that's
the part that really gets me about let's just switch everybody to
EVs, is that it maintains the sort of Americana suburbanized
fantasy that, like, we all drive a car, we all live in our homes,
and everybody has this perfect little access to all their little
resources, and that's not real. And so the moment that you
acknowledge that that's not happening for a lot of the people who
live around us, including perhaps ourselves, you then have to
examine, I would hope, what are the other potential futures that
we need to not only just start considering, but truly start
implementing, right? Like right now.


David Roberts


To pause on that for a second, because that was a fascinating ...


Warren Logan


Diatribe?


David Roberts


Natural experiment, sort of field experiment that nobody had
really planned very far in advance. What's your sense of how well
that is? Because as a good urbanist, what I would like to be true
is everyone saw these open streets, strolled down them, saw fewer
cars. It was like, "Ah, it's a new world. We can't ever let this
go. We're going to make this permanent." But my understanding is
that there's a lot of pushback. A lot of cities are under fire
for doing it. A lot of cities have reversed a lot of what they've
done.


Do you have a sense sort of overall how well those closures are
holding up?


Warren Logan


I think most of them are gone, right? I can even speak for
Oakland. Shortly after I left the mayor's office, so did the slow
streets. And I won't go down that path right now. But I think
that those types of really big decisions require courage and
leadership in a way that a lot of people found at the beginning
of the pandemic when they said, we have to do something because
the sky is on fire here. And in California truly, the confluence
of both COVID and the historic fires really felt like the world
was falling apart and that suddenly everything was on the table.


I don't think that we stopped. And by we, I mean, like, cities
generally stopped doing slow streets just because they weren't
working. Because that's not true. They were working, and a lot of
people really enjoyed them, and where they weren't working
highlighted, and I'll kind of use the Oakland example is the one
I know, but for the streets and the folks who lived on slow
streets that said, "this hasn't actually made me want to go
outside more. I'm not walking more or whatever," we still
measured that traffic was down. We still measured that traffic
was safer, right.


That speeds were lower, that DMT was lower, right. That they did,
in fact, have a positive impact, even if people didn't
necessarily want to acknowledge it or that that wasn't their
primary sort of metric of success. I think that they went away
because, it's kind of difficult to kind of go back to this,
right, but I think they went away because we're not comfortable
with change. And I feel like we're so close to just completely
turning over into this different paradigm.


And honestly, I'm not entirely sure why we look at good ideas and
say, "that's not possible. That's not for me, or that's too good
for me." And I heard that time and time again as people's
feedback about slow streets, not that they didn't want, like,
traffic-calm streets, or even cleaner air, but that they felt
like, "you're not doing this for me, you're doing it for someone
else to try and kick me out of my neighborhood," right. And I
completely understand where that distrust comes from because as a
Black man myself, I get it. Like, I really do. And we use the
G-word gentrification, or by extension, displacement, as a really
great tool to actually discourage investments in low income and
Black and Brown communities.


And I will try and avoid going down this whole rabbit hole here
with you.


David Roberts


But, well, I mean, it's at least worth noting. We have such a
dysfunctional urban administration in this country and urban
policies that people now basically think, "if you make my
neighborhood better, that's a threat to me."


Warren Logan


Exactly right.


David Roberts


"Don't come in here making my neighborhood better," right. When
people are out angry and yelling at you because you made their
neighborhood better, to me, that is just like the endpoint of so
many dysfunctional dynamics.


Warren Logan


It is. It's representative of the history of our country. That's
the tough part. That when people ask, just as you did, "why did
slow streets fail, right? Or why did they go away?" There's so
many like, how much time do you have, right? Like, there's so
many different reasons. Part of it is that all of us wanted to go
back to normal, even though COVID still raging in a lot of parts
of the country, right. The climate didn't get any better. In
fact, it got worse at the same time, I think too, continuing to
implement slow streets is like a full-time job that a bunch of my
staff didn't sign up for.


And in fact, it wasn't really their job. We pulled together this
kind of ragtag team that made this program work at the time, but
the moment that everybody got back around to saying, "well, I
want all of my other goods and services to be delivered to me
from the city, or by extension, whoever," right. The priority
shifted back to long-term capital planning and long-term delivery
of safety improvements. And my primary thesis around that was
like, "don't do that. Don't don't go back to doing things the
slow, expensive, difficult way," right? Like choose to have a 50
miles network of slow streets that need upgrades on a regular
basis, but that you now have a new, a completely different
foundation to build from, holding even in that all of the
consternation that people felt about them.


But truly, one of the things that I repeatedly told people is
like, "I don't want to keep apologizing for not implementing the
tools that I know we can." When someone gets hit by a car and
yells at me and says, "why didn't you do something?" The
underlying answer is, "yeah, I could have done something. And we
chose not to because of insert any number of reasons," and I
don't want to do that anymore.


David Roberts


One thing I always think about this, that the slow streets always
make me think about, is several years ago I went to Barcelona
because this guy obviously wasn't just one guy, but he was sort
of one of the sort of visionaries who envisioned it in the first
place and had been pushing for it for years. Salvador Rueda
wanted to turn over more than half of Barcelona streets to public
space, basically return them to people. But he didn't just go in
and do it, he spent years, he revised the bus system so that it
was much more grid-based, and linear, and much more frequent. And
you have to deal with walking paths and trees, and you have to
put the pieces in place, such that when you get the streets
turned over to people, they're nice and functional, which is very
different than just like, parachuting in one day and putting up
an orange cone.


Warren Logan


Right. And what Barcelona has that virtually no American city,
save for parts of San Francisco and New York, right, is density.


David Roberts


Yes.


Warren Logan


And that is such a critical issue. And I think this gets all the
way back to, "why can't we do things quickly? Why can't we just
shift to electric cars?" It's like, yeah, because if we don't
shift to electric cars, we then need to acknowledge that we
probably should have built denser housing next to each other.


David Roberts


Shoulda, coulda, woulda.


Warren Logan


Right. And I think the other part too, though, kind of to your
point about Barcelona and a number of other places, is that they
did that when we had time.


And I think that one of the parts that I'm actively, and I think
a lot of other climate resilient folks are on the same bandwagon,
is that we don't have time anymore to keep having these debates.
We don't have time anymore to just keep talking about what the
future could be like if we all got our act together. Because the
science has proven time and again and just like literally look
outside, that we have run out of time on this issue, and so we
got to start making big moves yesterday.


David Roberts


Yeah, well, let me ask about that, because this is a tangled and
contentious topic in urbanism, but one of the reasons that things
tend to move slowly in big affluent cities when you're trying to
free up road space — or get rid of parking, or rezone or whatever
— is that the mechanisms of democracy in a city basically end up
empowering a relatively narrow set of affluent homeowners.


Warren Logan


Absolutely.


David Roberts


So to the extent there's democracy or what looks like democracy,
it's all pushing in the wrong direction. And so when you talk
about going faster, when you talk about let's just do things,
it's hard to avoid at least the impression of let's have less
democracy, let's have less public feedback, let's run roughshod
over people. How do you navigate that?


Warren Logan


So, great question. I think that what's interesting, and I got
that pushback and continue to, but that what was interesting
about, let's say, like "tactical urbanism". I'm going to just
zoom out slightly from slow streets themselves.


David Roberts


Define that for our listeners.


Warren Logan


Absolutely. So, dear listener, "tactical urbanism" is when you
use kind of not found objects but materials like jersey barriers,
water walls, paint, signs to affect the type of right of way
change that then hopefully you'll come back and literally and
figuratively cement later on.


David Roberts


Right, but that doesn't involve really infrastructure change.
It's really jury rigged, cobbled together urbanism.


Warren Logan


Exactly. It's like style on a dime kind of thing over here.


David Roberts


To return to Barcelona, the first superblock they implemented,
the first time they actually tried to close the streets and hand
them over to people, that's what they did. They parachuted in
over one weekend and just put like orange cones and plant pots on
the streets and then got the neighbors together the following
week and like, "hey, look, you have a superblock. What would you
like to do with it?" Not, "should we do this? But now that it's
here ..."


Warren Logan


"What now?"


David Roberts


"What would you like to do with it?"


Warren Logan


Well, and that's what's so interesting about to your point about
if by going fast, do we lose democracy? And I don't think we do.
And let me kind of play out a bit of the ways that all of these
different, again, tactical urbanist projects programs that we
launched during COVID actually had more engagement. I met with
community groups twice a week for half a year just on slow
streets.


David Roberts


Oh, my God, you poor man.


Warren Logan


No, but don't get me wrong. I like engagement. I like people. And
like well, I don't necessarily enjoy getting yelled at all time.
It is actually helpful because once we've really got to the heart
of the matter, we found out so many different issues that people
had with a lot of the other programs we were running that we
would have never found out had we not been engaging with them on
such a regular clip. And this gets us back to my point about the
trust, or really distrust in government issue, is that you don't
build trust by talking about something for ten years and then not
doing anything.


David Roberts


Wait, that's Seattle city government's central strategy. What do
you mean it doesn't work?


Warren Logan


Well, I'll give them a call. No, I can't help you there. But I
lived down here. But I think that that's the other really
critical element that multiple people, I think begrudgingly
shared with me was that they're like, "listen, we may not like
the Slow Streets Program all that much, and we really hate that
you didn't call us the day you did it, but it sure is nice to
have all of the senior leaders of one department on a regular
phone call with us so we can air our grievances on a regular
basis. And then, better yet, see the next week that you've made
changes that we ask for."


And that that is the seminal thing that I want people to take
away from these programs, is that you have to expect that level
of service from your government, and that anything short of that
is not democracy. And that this whole system that we've built so
far really only benefits a few people, and they're really good at
making sure it stays that way.


David Roberts


Yeah, a side question related to that. One of the things I heard
from city administrators about kind of the COVID thing is, in a
sense, by not being able to have meetings in person, they had to
have them online. And a lot of them said that actually brought a
lot more people into the process and a much more diverse array of
people into the process. Like, if you're having a meeting on a
Tuesday evening, it's all the old white people in coordinating
T-shirts who ...


Warren Logan


Oh, I love coordinating T-shirts, though.


David Roberts


Who have show up. But if you have it online, then, like, normal
people can come. Did you find that too?


Warren Logan


Yes, absolutely. And frankly, just from a time standpoint, it was
much easier to jump from ... now, granted, this is where my
mental health probably suffered ... is jumping from one meeting
to another over, and over, and over again. But you cannot
discount, just your point. The fact that I could then meet with
way more people because I didn't need to travel from one side of
the city to the other. The other bit was and again, this kind of
goes to, like, boundary setting that I'm working on, of course,
is that it's also easy to have meetings with people at night or
in the mornings at times that are not the best meeting times.


But if you want to have a 30 minutes phone call with me, that's
easier if I can also be cooking dinner for my family at the same
time. And that is true not only for myself, but also for the
people I'm engaging with that are like, "I don't have time to
come down to City Hall and talk to you about this. I'd rather
tweet at you and get a response, right?" Like, God forbid any of
your listeners go look at any of my tweets. I apologize in
advance, but there are plenty of instances where someone or lots
of people asked a question, and I took the time to really spell
out, "here's how we got here, and if you want to talk more, give
me a call, right?"


That type of engagement via zoom, but also digital in the form of
social media, can really support a lot of transportation
engagement.


David Roberts


And it seems also, I mean, this is slightly speculative on my
part, but just psychologically, I feel like a lot of the things
people bring up as objections to these kind of projects, like,
I'm not telling you anything, but just listeners. Like, if you go
watch the CSPAN or read the transcripts from some of these
community meetings, the things people cite as objections to bike
lanes and apartment buildings are so ...


Warren Logan


They're comical, if not homicidal. It's crazy.


David Roberts


They defy parity. But I feel like a lot of that is a little bit
of displaced, like, "you're not listening to me, like I'm not
being listened to," and that maybe if people got the sense like,
"oh, I do have an open channel, there is someone listening and
responsive," that some of that might fade. Is that too
optimistic?


Warren Logan


I think that's true, kind of. And here's the important part that
I really I must stress this, is that you cannot equate me
listening to you getting what you want.


David Roberts


Yes.


Warren Logan


I could have heard you, and the answer might be no.


David Roberts


It could be that you said something, and I did decide it was
wrong.


Warren Logan


Right. We're not just like, right and wrong, but that if we use
that as the barometer for my listening to everyone, we wouldn't
actually which is kind of how government works. We wouldn't get
anything done because we'd be going left, right, left, right,
left, right, left, right. And that's, I think, kind of to the
very end. That's why government is slow, because if you truly
listen to everybody, you're like, "okay, I got to hold on. I got
to take a tiny little step, did the sky fall?" I think the other
bit, though, and this is really important, about, again, like
tactical urbanism and big moves, et cetera, is that there are
lots of activities that cities engage in every single day, every
week, every month, every year, that if you called them something
else, you would think that they were actually tactical urbanism.


So I just want to give you and your listeners, like, a couple of
examples and hopefully that will elicit ... but like, "yes, it's
possible, and we don't have to fight over this so much." One is
every single time that someone like a municipal utility does
construction on your street, they file for an encroachment
permit. It usually doesn't take very long to get that, maybe less
than 30 days. So we are, in fact, capable of doing these plans
quickly. The next bit is that they go set up a bunch of orange
cones and traffic signs and say, "merge left", "road close",
"detour", whatever.


And we all accept that on a daily basis in our neighborhoods, on
our freeways, on our site, whatever. That's just like, "okay,
that's a change, and we'll see what happens," right? And we kind
of adapt to it pretty much immediately. That happens all the
time. But instead of it being construction for a gas line, take
that out and put kids playing in the street. Which in fact brings
me to special event activities. It is not uncommon that cities in
my own city, and I'm sure Seattle does this too, because I've
been there and I've done it, also permits special events, right?


So let's say that there's a concert in downtown, and they've
closed some of the streets so that people can walk around more
easily. Just take those instances. And then instead of it being
once a year, it's every weekend, it's every month, and maybe
every day. And that's the kind of thing that we also really kind
of encourage through our second program. So, like, we had slow
streets and we had flex streets, and for a lot of cities, you
probably know these as like, parklets or outdoor eateries. But
that's the same concept where instead of saying, "well, this is
for COVID," it's like, "maybe it's just nice to sit outside and
drink a beer."


David Roberts


This gets to another enduring mystery of the of the kind of
sociology of this, which is you do those things, you close down a
couple of streets downtown for a farmer's market, or a concert,
or just a festival, or whatever, an event. People love it.


Warren Logan


People love it.


David Roberts


And yet it never occurs to them to think ...


"What if we did more of this?"


"What if we did this like, twice a year, right? Hey, what if we
did it every week?" Like, why doesn't it translate? Or they're
just not channels for people to express that positive feeling.


Warren Logan


Or I think it's scale, and it's ... going all the way back to our
engagement, right ... like, we never asked you what I mean. So
embedded in Oakland's Flex Street Program was actually the sort
of Easter egg that I left that was like, "we should think about
this for long-term special events. That what if we didn't say
slow streets are for people biking and walking," which I think is
a net positive, but people have some feelings about that. "What
if we said if you want a festival in your neighborhood or if you
want a farmers market?"


Those are things that people say, "oh, yeah, I'd like having a
weekly farmers market nearby. Okay, well, we got to close the
street for that." And suddenly when you start to identify the
activity that people are willing to give up their cars for,
effectively, that's where you really get the special sauce. And
it's funny because in Oakland, it turns out one of those special
activities that I did not expect is rollerblading. Yeah. All of a
sudden we have full blown roller discos that popped up across the
city, and now there are clubs of people who show up.


And I don't want to say it's like a flash mob situation because
it's planned, but it's amazing, right? And I think that that's
the part. That ...


David Roberts


These are the car free streets.


Warren Logan


Yeah. So they're not only on car free streets, but they've since
taken them to parks. There's like a weekly ... like this is so
Oakland, but once a month there's a drag show on wheels called
"Rolling with the Homos". And it's fabulous, but it is also an
outgrowth of like a bunch of people rollerblading more because of
COVID. And that tapping into, like, what activity do you enjoy
more than driving? Which, by the way, lots of activities.


David Roberts


Yes, almost all of them.


Warren Logan


That's the trade off that we need to make. And it can't just be,
"oh, I want to make the street safer," which don't get me wrong
should be enough, but I want to make the street safer for kids to
play in, which would be awesome on its own, but that people are
selfish, and that's great. Like, I love that people are selfish —
and I don't love that, but I'm being facetious. But finding out
what they value from like a social activity standpoint is often a
really winning strategy, for then having conversations about
whether it be tactical or urbanism changes to your streets or
long-term capital improvements to a highway, for example.


But I will share even just kind of a similar example is that in
Oakland there is a street, I won't name names because then people
will be mad. But there is a street that the city planned a
protected bikeway on, and a very large number of the businesses
were like, "you're going to take away parking spaces, and that's
going to spell the end of this district. So hell no, we won't
go."


David Roberts


Let me just insert here. This is one of many areas in urbanism
where the research question has been answered. It is settled. You
do not lose business when you lose parking spaces. When you
increase bike and pedestrian flow, you get more business. And yet
that evidence never seems to play any role in the next round of
argument over this thing. This is one of the mysterious things
about urbanism, is like, we learn things, but they never seem to
...


Warren Logan


They never seem to stick.


And I think let me touch on that for just a second, because
having helped manage a parking program in the city of Berkeley, I
can tell you what's really happening. I felt like such a varied
experience in transportation. Like, "wait, I have the answer to
that." It turns out, and this is the people are selfish
discussion, is that when business owners and employees say,
"you're going to remove parking," I think that everybody else
hears, "oh, for your customers." Of course you're worried about
your customers. That's not true. I mean, they might be worried
about their customers, but truly, if you get down to it, what
they're actually saying is," I depend on driving to work," for
whatever reason.


There's plenty of very good reasons why that happens. We're not
going to go into that. But what they're really saying is, I get
here via a specific mode, and your restriction on that mode then
means that you might be compromising my ability to work and to
feed my family. And I've met a number of women, for example, who
are like, "I get off work at midnight, I work at a bar, I work at
a restaurant, whatever, and you're not going to tell me that I
need to walk a quarter of a mile to the bus stop at one in the
morning. That's just not happening."


Without diving too far into this, I just want to kind of give air
to why people land where they do. That being said, circling back
to the sort of tacticle urbanism bit, a lot of these same
businesses said, "well, we don't want to live with our parking
spaces. Yada, yada." And then when we opened up the Parklet
Program, the Flex Street Parklets, suddenly all of them had
outdoor eateries. And so I asked them, like, "well, you got rid
of 'your parking,' for this dining experience. I thought the sky
was going to fall down if you lost your parking."


And like, "oh, well, the trade off was that I got more business.
I can guarantee that I will get more business with more space,"
and there's a lot of things to unpack there. But the salient
point that I keep coming back to is that we need to start asking
questions in a very different way, other than, "how do you feel
about the ways I want to address climate change? How do you feel
about a bike lane?" Because that's not working. And what is
working is all of these other tools that we don't mean to be
using for this strategy, but I genuinely believe that if we
started by saying, "hey, this neighborhood has a monthly eatery
stroll, they close off the main street for all the restaurants
and you take the kids out or whatever."


"What if we did that every weekend?" I bet you most people would
be like, "that sounds kind of nice. Yeah, let's do that, right?"
And then suddenly you might say, "this has been so lovely, maybe
we should extend it to Friday, Saturday, and Sunday." Which is in
fact what some, I think it's in Toronto, there's a business
district, and forgive me if I have the wrong city. So dear
listener, if you have the right city, call me. But that they
close their bar district to cars a. because then the businesses
really enjoy it, because they have way more people, and it's
actually safer.


But the other side of it is that it also means probably fewer
emissions because people are like, "well, let's carpool or let's
take a Lyft, or let's take the bus, or whatever," because the
streets are restricted in a certain way.


David Roberts


Did you ever feel that you had enough of these positive examples
under your belt? Like, "look, we closed this every so often here,
and it went well. And like, the now the businesses are on board."
Did you ever feel like you were able to build momentum off those,
such that the next one was easier? Because, like, part of what
seems maddening about urbanism to me is that every one of these
fights seems to start ...


Warren Logan


All over again.


David Roberts


From friggin ground zero and cover all the same ground again. Did
you ever feel like there was momentum, like you were getting
ahead of steam?


Warren Logan


I think that we did a little bit. And I kind of want to use an
example of "a tale of two different bikeways" as a way that, I
think, we are starting to break through some of this ice. So
there's Telegraph Avenue in Oakland that spans, it goes from
downtown Oakland, like City Hall, basically, to the foot of UC
Berkeley, funny enough, and the portion that runs from downtown
through uptown Koreatown Northgate, and then through a district
called Temescal all has, what was the time, a tactical urbanist
paint and post protected bikeway. And that pilot taught us a lot
of things, and most importantly, taught us that we we can't do
those types of pilots anymore because they took too long.


And people were like ... it just got really messy.


David Roberts


People objected to the bike lane when it was there. Like, it was
controversial, impractical.


Warren Logan


Yeah, like super controversial and still remains controversial
for a whole host of reasons. I'll kind of break apart in a
second. So as we were engaging on 14th street, which is actually
like, it starts just where Telegraph begins in downtown that goes
East/West instead of North/South, we said, "hey, we want to put a
protected bike lane here as well." And this is the business
district that was like, "you're going to take away our parking.
This is going to kill our neighborhood. And we don't want what
you did to Telegraph," right? "We don't want to have that."


And that's like a totally fair statement. That pilot had some
really big issues, and pilots shouldn't last five years, they
should last five months.


David Roberts


At a certain point. You're making mockery of the idea of tactical
urbanism when you're ...


Warren Logan


That's right.


David Roberts


When your flimsy little posts are five years old.


Warren Logan


But what we did learn, and this is where I hope that we have some
momentum, is that when we injected the parklet part of all of
this because, like insert COVID and this timeline, watching all
of these business owners happily, gleefully take away, in some
cases, half of the parking on their block, if not more, for
outdoor dining, and not a peep from many of them, saying, "well,
you took my..." because they're the ones taking it away, right.


We got to realizing that the space allocation, again is a matter
of programming, where if you just say, "well, I'm making this
space, instead of for your car, I'm making it for someone else's
bike," that's a really difficult place to start the conversation.
But if you said, "hey, can I make more space for your business on
this street," and by extension for more just like vital, vibrant
activity of people walking around, they might say, "yeah, that
sounds great. That's going to be good for me."


"Oh, well, are you sure? Because that might require taking some
of these parking spaces."


"Well, if I get to use that space for myself as well, then that
might work."


And that's one of the things that we did see in the 14th street
design that just went to council. I want to say two weeks ago,
that they passed unanimously was that some of the major changes
were based on lessons learned from this Parklet Program, where we
actually took away even more parking to make these mega, bulb-out
plazas, that suddenly make the street more of a destination.


But it's that type of creative thinking that a. it's just
difficult, and b. is the type of thinking that we need to be
using to really tackle our obsession with cars.


David Roberts


Oh, my God, are there reforms? I mean, some of this obviously is
just psychology, and sociology, and how you approach it, and how
you communicate, and all that kind of stuff, and how you think
about it. But there are also mechanisms of government, and
mechanisms of review, and laws and stuff gumming up the works, in
some sense. So are there city government reforms that are
relatively simple that you could think of that would just ...


Warren Logan


Fix all of this?


David Roberts


Well, at the very least, ease the flow, at least move things
along more quickly.


Warren Logan


So there are a couple, and I have actually written like little
mini essays on my Twitter about this, because I genuinely like, I
don't want to gatekeep ideas that I have. I want people to be
thinking about them too and saying, "wait, no, I don't like this.
Let's switch it to this."


I will give you two different ideas that I've come up with so
far. One is in the traditional, capital improvement process. And
let me kind of just zoom out for a second and explain that. Dear
listener, whenever there is a multimillion dollar capital
improvement, which is just an infrastructure project on a road in
your city, there is a planning and engineering phase, which is
both, like, the engagement component, there's design, and then
just literally like, the engineering component of, like, "will
this stand up? Am I going to dig into a pipe?" Like, all of the
very specific minutiae that make sure that your street doesn't
completely fall apart. And then there's the actual construction
phase, and then you get to use the thing that we built.


That takes a really long time. And let's say, for example, that
you're like, "gee, this is a really dangerous street, and we need
to fix it right now. Great. Let's spend two years trying to go
get $20 million, then let's spend five more years planning and
engaging about this street, and then two more years to construct
it."


So we're a damn near a decade in before you've actually fixed the
problem. And that's not great. That's bad. And in fact, that's
really shitty.


David Roberts


Those are injuries and accidents piling up ...


Warren Logan


Piling up.


David Roberts


While you're missing about.


Warren Logan


And so the pivot that I want us to make is to insert at the very
beginning of this conversation a tactical urbanism adjustment or
adjustments, for that matter. And it serves two main purposes.
One, is that you get some of the benefits you need early, much
earlier, so that people just stop dying from getting hit by cars,
which is a very serious issue. And by implementing a something in
front of people, like, just a physical change to the right of
way, helps people talk about the concept that you're proposing as
a physical thing in front of them instead of in the abstract.


Most people have different types of imagination. And it turns
out, I just learned this recently, that some people don't even
have inner monologues. They don't think.


David Roberts


Oh my God.


Warren Logan


Like, that there's no picture or anything. When I found that, I
was like, "that's fascinating."


David Roberts


I know the amount of envy I feel. Imagine it being quiet in
there.


Oh my God, I'm right there with you. Just shut up in there.


Anyway, my point is that not everybody is a city player. Duh. And
that if I were to describe a parking protected cycle track to
you, like, I can imagine most of your listeners faces are kind of
glossing over at this point. But if I were to go out there
tomorrow and just put some cones out there and say, "park over
here, don't park here, and let's let people bicycle here, and
let's just watch what happens for a few minutes." That is a much
easier way for people to give feedback that is at least based on
reality, instead of based on their impression of what might or
might not happen.


And people have very faulty intuitions. Let's just throw that out
there too, even whatever. Well educated city people, just human
beings have some very ... things that happen in urbanism are very
counterintuitive. The results are very counter ... And it's not
something that people, even though, as I'm sure you're aware,
every citizen is absolutely convinced that they are an urbanism
expert. But in fact, there are lots of weird and counterintuitive
results. And you do kind of need to know, you do kind of need to
see things before you have a good sense of how they work out. But
I'm assuming one reason city governments aren't just like, "while
we're contemplating this $20 million capital improvement, we're
going to slap together some orange cone type of arrangements here
and do like a 60% 70% fix while we talk about it."


I assume the reason they're not doing that is that they're
paranoid about legal liability of some kind.


Warren Logan


Well, and that's the part that, again, I'm kind of calling BS.
Because part of the structure of the emergency team that I worked
in wasn't just planners. We actually had an economic development
person, and we had a city administrator, and perhaps most
importantly, we had one of the city attorneys. And his voice at
the table was so important because I was just like, you thinking,
"oh, hold on, we can't do that because we're going to get sued."
He's like, "who told you that, that's not going to get us sued."
Like, don't worry about that. Like, we have, for better or for
worse, a lot of immunity when it comes to changing the rights of
way, as long as we've done our homework.


But again, and this kind of gets me to the next, second proposal
here is in the same way that we allow all of these private
companies and municipal utilities to adjust the right of way
regularly for construction.


David Roberts


Right.


Warren Logan


The mechanism by which we do that has all the checks and balances
necessary for us to approve that. So why can't we open up that
same avenue so to speak for ...


David Roberts


Good one.


Warren Logan


Everyday people, I'm trying here, everyday people to make those
types of suggestions so that we can talk about them. Because I've
met lots of people who are like, "well, why don't you just try
____?"


David Roberts


Right?


Warren Logan


And what's interesting is that, I tried this with my own staff
where I, I don't say bribed, but breakfast burritos will get you
a long way, let's put it that way. I asked two of our staff and
the DOT to grab, like, I think they had like 30 orange cones and
vests, safety vests, safety first. To meet me in downtown and I
just wanted to see, you know, as part of our, like, dialogue
around 14th street if it was possible to narrow one of the cross
streets to make like a really big plaza.


And I'd had the same conversation with them like a year prior and
it was like, "well, we could kind of design it, and then we'd
have to throw it in the model, and see how that would work." I
was like, "or we could go have breakfast, and you grab the cones,
and we'd just put up a sign, and say see what happens."


David Roberts


This should be the new slogan for the tactical urbanism movement
grab the cones.


Warren Logan


Grab the cones and breakfast burritos.


David Roberts


Forget the model, grab the cones.


Warren Logan


True. But the funny thing though is that in the short, maybe 2
hours we were out there, at prime time, really, or what would be
prime time, but people aren't driving it downtown very much
anymore. We took one lane away, and we're like yeah, this is
nice. Nothing's happening instead of light. So the queue was
clearing every single time. So if there was green, all the cars
that were waiting got through the light. Then we tried another
lane and still the same effect. And it was interesting to watch
how traffic flow was actually slowing a bit instead of speeding
on through, and that suddenly people were easily walking across
the street.


And the last bit of course, was that we had a couple of business
owners come over to us and like, "hey, what are you doing?" We're
like, "oh, we just want to see how far we can build a plaza." One
of them was like, "well, can I get one on my side of the street?"
And we're like, "this this is how we should be having this
conversation."


David Roberts


I want a plaza.


Warren Logan


We all want plazas. So I lift up those two examples that both
rely on this sort of like, "let's just try it for a second and
see if the sky falls down." Because what we are failing to
recognize, and I think this is so important, is that the existing
condition is not an ideal scenario that we are having to
negotiate away from. It's actually a s**t sandwich that we have
sort of convinced ourselves is the best thing we can ever have,
and that anytime someone says "I'd like to change what you're
eating," like "no, I have to keep this," like really?


David Roberts


I mean, the modal situation in a prosperous US city is that it's
getting worse, right? Is that traffic is getting worse. Not just
that we're defending some wonderful status quo, it's that just
the natural flow of things makes things worse and worse. If
you're car dependant, and you got more and more people coming in,
it's just math.


Warren Logan


But you know, David, sometimes math is difficult.


David Roberts


Math is hard.


Warren Logan


But you know, that's the thing is that, and this gets us all the
way back to your original question, "what if we just had more
electric vehicles?" It's like, yeah, partly, but even if you just
swapped all of the cars for electric cars, you'd still be stuck
in traffic all day. You'd still have all these traffic deaths,
probably more, right. It doesn't put us in the best situation we
could get to. It certainly would address air quality issues.
Absolutely. I'm not going to pretend like it doesn't, but that
can't be the only solution because then you have cemented once
again all of these other problems that become stickier and
stickier.


Because if I just bought a $70,000 electric car, the last thing
I'm going to hear is somebody telling me, "sorry, you can't drive
anymore because you're going to hit somebody." Like, no. You know
what I mean?


David Roberts


It's slight addendum to the previous question, and I feel like
it's often used in a somewhat glib way. But one of the things
people like to say now is, "oh, it's the environmental rules.
Like all the environmentalists are telling us they want
walkability and et cetera," but at the same time it's the
environmental rules that they put in place that are slowing
things down, right. Environmental review, et cetera, et cetera.
Was that your experience? Was that a big piece of the puzzle in
your experience? Or is that more just a Twitter thing?


Warren Logan


It kind of depends on the subject. So yes, environmental review
can be a major source of delay for certain types of projects. And
I think that it is up to the states, sorry this sounds very like
states rightsy and I don't mean for to — it is up to your local
representative — to streamline those. That each time we identify
something that we know is a good right, like, yeah, it's a good
thing that we, you know, encourage more infill development or we
encourage, you know, more people to ride bicycles. If the first
issue, if the first barrier is, "hold on, I got to do, in our
case CEQA, the California Environmental Quality Act."


"I got to do two years worth of CEQA." That's when you got to
say, "hold on, time to streamline," at least that exemption,
which we now have for a lot of things. The issue that we've now
run into in California, and I think this is probably true for a
lot of other places too, but it's especially true for California,
is that we use CEQA, again or California Environmental Quality
Act, to appeal infill development projects near transit. And that
is the most blatant abuse and frankly, like misuse of a set of
regulations that truly were there to protect us.


You have to remember that we put in all this environmental review
because you had a bunch of companies throwing sewage in the
water. So it's not like it came from nowhere. And I won't go into
federal politics right now, but we're about to remind ourselves
why we have these rules, is my point.


Oh good.


Hip hip hooray, right. But my point is though, that if we are
running into that as a barrier, we can't just say, "oh, well, I
guess we got to slow it down." It's like, "well, maybe we should
fix this upstream issue so that we no longer have to have this
problem later on."


David Roberts


That brings about another thing. You often hear from city people
and city planners. And maybe it's not as true in California as it
is in some other cities, but lots of times, city administrations
find themselves at odds with state government. Because in a lot
of states, what you have is, like your one urban blue area
surrounded by the red sticks, and you have a red governor and a
red state government and a blue city, and the red state
government just wants to stick it to the blue city at every
opportunity. But even in California where it's blue top to
bottom, did you find that the interaction of city and state is a
point of friction for you?


Warren Logan


Not since I've been working, it's not as of late. And I'm sure
plenty of your listeners have come up with arguments about
exactly why that's wrong. But I think that at least for many of
the CEQA abuses that we have been running into over the last
decade, I would say, we have very fortunately, or it's no
fortune, it's very astutely elected people who have gone in and
adjusted those rules. I'm very happy and quite proud of our state
legislators who are like, "oh, are you having trouble narrowing
your street because of traffic safety in the environment because
of CEQA? Okay, let's fix that."


And now there's a fix to it, right? Like we even had. One of the
things we noticed with slow streets, was that we depended on an
emergency authority to do those programs. And someone kind of
mentioned it to some state folks and said, "maybe these aren't
perfect, but if cities want to make their streets safer, they
probably shouldn't run into this very arcane set of rules. Can
you fix that for us"? And now we have a law that says, "yeah, you
can totally do that." So I've been really happy to see some
pretty strong proactive movement at the state level to try and
limit city discretion and kind of like abuse of these types of
rules, which is sort of the opposite but exact issue that you're
talking about.


The other thing I want to highlight though is that, and this is a
genuine question, I don't fully understand how it is that
bicycling has to be like a blue state thing, or that electric
cars has to be a blue state thing.


David Roberts


Well, I mean, why are hamburgers, why are trucks, why are, you
know, like the NFL, it's everything now.


Warren Logan


But God forbid everybody just has clean air. You know what I
mean? Okay.


David Roberts


Well, I think it's a big part of the answer to me, and it's not
just for red states, but for the US. Generally is just that ...
as we've said several times, lots of things about urbanism are
not necessarily intuitive, and lots of times you just need to see
something to understand what it means or how it's going to work.
And there just are not a lot of good examples in the US to look
to anywhere. Anywhere. Even in the blue states, it's very
difficult to go into a community and say, "look, we would like to
be more like that."


You go over to Europe throw a rock, you hit a cute public plaza,
they're just standard.


Warren Logan


But David, that's Europe and we're not Europe. Okay?


David Roberts


This is what I mean. If you could just get like one or two in
some mid-size US city, so you could at least say, "look, like
Pikipsee has this great walkable public plaza served by transit,"
you could just point somewhere. But we've done it so wrong so
long, we're so deep in the hole.


Warren Logan


Well, the tough part is that we're kind of stuck on this, "well,
that's New York. That's Amsterdam. That's Barcelona." And what's
odd to me is when you really get at the heart of, even to some
degree, our worst sides of American culture, they're like, "we
can do anything." Where did that go?


David Roberts


Yeah, where's our exceptionalism?


Warren Logan


Yeah, like, our American exceptionalism. Like, why is it that we
can't apply that to really big thinking around our cities? Right?
Like, it wasn't even that long ago that someone well, not
someone, Eisenhower was like, we should really have freeways
everywhere. And then we just did it with plenty of impacts,
primarily to Black and Brown neighborhoods and low income
communities. But my point is that what happened to all the folks
who said, "we're Americans," if we want to change our cities
tomorrow to be walkable, safe, vibrant, lovely places that are
better than Paris, that are better than Barcelona, that are
better than Amsterdam?


Like, what happened to that?


David Roberts


Yeah, it's wild that nobody's even aspiring or talking about
that. It does sound like a very American thing, like, "we're
going to make our city better than Paris." We seemed really
Stockholm Syndromed into thinking that we can't have nice things,
we can't live in nice places.


Warren Logan


Which are also the same people who've gone to Europe and
experienced, "well, we can't have that."


David Roberts


It's like, "yes, we're going to Disney World or going to LA, and
going to the Grove," whatever they call them. These horrific sort
of simulacra of small towns that they're building now, but with
only the retail in it. Yeah. So creepy. Yeah. I don't fully get
it. Well, I've kept you too long. Let's just say, as a final
note, as a final question, I would just like to hear about a
project you were involved in that you felt like worked. People
are happy with it. It happened on a reasonably rapid rate of
speed. It stuck and still exists. It improved things.


Is there a project you were involved in that you think of as like
"yes, I'd love to have more of that."


Warren Logan


Absolutely. I would say the Parklet Program, the fact that all of
them are still up.


David Roberts


Oh, yeah. Is that true in Oakland? All the parklets?


Warren Logan


Yeah, in Oakland, same with San Francisco. Not that I implemented
that program, but it has been really exciting to see that they're
all still up. I've even seen businesses upgrade them. I'm getting
calls from people who are like, "oh, hey, let me get your opinion
on this, because I'm working with this other group, and we're
going to upgrade all over parklets next year, and have them all
kind of look the same." And the important part here is that
Oakland used to, had a Parklet Program before COVID. And what I
did with our team was rewrite that program to a. make it free, b.
provide technical support, and c. to self certify a bunch of the
different requirements, that otherwise the city would have to go
through and check over the course of like five years.


And what that has done is it's not only unlocked all this amazing
public space, right, all these parking spaces that are now
beautiful areas to sit, and eat, and drink, and hang out. It has
also showcased just how creative Oaklanders are, that many of our
parklets are wrapped in like beautiful murals that folks paid
local artists to do. And so you can't tell me that we can't just
overnight change our mind about at least this strip of land that
we call a parking space, because that's exactly what we did. We
just said, "oh, I want to use this for literally anything else."


And they're everywhere. And that's awesome.


David Roberts


And this is another reason it's so important to do early in the
process, rather than talk, talk, talk, is first, you just have to
convey to people that streets and parking spaces are public
space. That alone, I feel like, is wildly counterintuitive and
new to most Americans. Just the idea that we collectively own
this space. We don't have to have ... cars on it, right. It
doesn't have to be for cars. And two is just and this is of
course what Barcelona learned, what everybody learns when they do
this, is just when you create the public space, when you give
people a place to come together, they will do things that you
could never, ever predict in advance.


Warren Logan


Absolutely.


David Roberts


That they would do. They're so creative and so interesting. And
people will do the cutest, coolest, most interesting things like
walk around Barcelona to these superblocks. They just basically
handed the neighborhood. They're like, "we're going to close off
traffic to the streets in this neighborhood. Go for it." And so
they've done just an amazing array of things like parks, and
cafes, and little sculptures, and just everything you could
imagine, you could never have predicted at all.


Warren Logan


Yes, all of that is so true. And I think the exciting part about
parklets, this sounds so silly because it's like I'm so ecstatic
about them and probably ... but that the questions we started
getting were very much like as if we had planted a seed and
suddenly people saw the world in a totally different way for
people to say, well, here's one question. Originally we'd opened
up the program to businesses that had storefronts, and then the
next group said, "well, I don't have a storefront, but this
business owner here that does have a storefront said, 'wouldn't
it be nice if my bar had a food truck outside and tables to sit
and eat?'" Like, "oh yeah, okay, let's expand the program."


So actually our Parklet Program includes a brand new kind of Food
Truck Program alongside it. Then another group of people said,
"well, I don't own a business, but why can't I have a parklet in
front of my house? Like, I'm not using the park space in front of
my house, and maybe I don't want to put a coffee shop there, but
like, could I put some plants there? Could I ..."


David Roberts


A couple of benches?


Warren Logan


Yeah, I put some benches, and that was like the final Easter egg.
I left right ... when I left the mayor's office was like, there's
actually no functional reason why business owners are allowed to
take over the parking spaces in front of their brick-and-mortars,
but that residential properties can't do the same thing. And that
has a, you know, I haven't seen a residential Parklet Program
yet. If you're listeners, if you know one, tweet at me
immediately because I want to know. Famous last words. I'm going
to get a lot of tweets now. But that to me was like watching
people unlock the like, "well, if we could do that, why can't we
do this?"


"And if we can do that, then why can we do this?" And I'm like,
that type of thinking is exactly how we should be approaching our
city.


David Roberts


Exactly. You look at a road for cars or a parking space for cars,
it's just that forever. It's never going to get better. It's
almost inevitably going to get worse, but it's never going to be
any different. But if you just think of it as space, if you take
the cars out, and it's just space, there's millions of things you
could do to it. The sky is the limit. Your imagination is the
limit. And people will find more of those as there are more
public spaces. You just hope, as I said before, you just hope at
some point that there's like a collective tipping point.


Even if it's only just in Oakland. I's just like enough people
see enough public spaces to have the light go on. Like, "oh,
public spaces are cool, and fun, and great, and space for cars
sucks and is ugly. Like, let's switch the one for the other."


Warren Logan


I love my city, and I'm very happy I live here. And in some ways,
it's not a big city. We don't have a big budget. And so, in such
a weird way, if people look at us and say, "well, if Oakland can
do it, so can I," so be it. If that's the way that we start this
kind of, like, big change of changing our roads and changing our
travel behavior.


David Roberts


Exactly. Any seed will do. Well, thanks so much for taking all
this time. Thanks for all your, I'm sure, what was often
thankless work, beating back the cars.


Warren Logan


Thanks.


David Roberts


Thanks for coming on, Warren


Warren Logan


Absolutely. Thank you for having me.


David Roberts


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